by Zoë Archer
“Athena’s magic has grown considerably. She is now one of the most powerful witches in recent history.” Graves’s look was direct and serious. “When the Heirs woke the Primal Source, it was time to gather the Blades to combat this new threat.”
“Call in reinforcements,” said Nathan.
“Precisely,” Graves said. “We need all the help we can muster. So Athena sent out the plea, using her magic, summoning every Blade to England. What you thought was a dream, Astrid, was a call to arms.”
Astrid frowned, absorbing this. She was being pulled back home, back to her old life and old world. She was a Blade—she, Nathan, and Graves all knew this.
But Nathan wasn’t a Blade. He had one home, and that home was her.
She had to leave, had responsibilities and a code. A sense of honor. But he might lose her to that which he loved about her.
“How many Blades are there?” asked Nathan.
“Haven’t done a formal count,” said Graves, “but no matter what our numbers are, they will always be far fewer than the Heirs. Yet we must call on all of them. No matter where they are—even the most hidden corners of the world.”
“The threat is so great?”
Graves held Nathan’s gaze with his own and there was no embellishment there, only cold truth. Truth that froze Nathan to his marrow. “Everything,” said Graves. “Everything is at stake.”
Chapter 16
Vows
Night progressed and life continued in exchanges of words and sips from the canteen.
“The first Blade of the Rose was a woman?” asked Nathan.
“Frances of Strathmore,” answered Catullus. “A master weaver. She made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and discovered crusading knights trying to enslave a djinn. Frances and Jack Dutton, a blacksmith and fellow pilgrim, stopped them. But centuries passed before the Blades as we know them truly came to be.”
Astrid, her mind clouded with swarms of thoughts, listened only partly as Nathan and Catullus talked of the history of the Blades of the Rose—the beginnings of the organization, its broadening purpose, the struggle to best an enemy that never stopped growing or striving. Nathan, in his incisive way, cut to the heart of the matter with direct questions, and she heard, in Catullus’s straightforward answers, the tentative beginnings of friendship between the two men. Both of them, Catullus and Nathan, urged onward by a continual striving. Catullus impelled by his capacious brain to create new inventions. Nathan driven to right wrongs, fight for those who could not.
Time slipped away. She felt it as surely as if holding water in her cupped hands. No matter how tightly she kept the seal of her fingers, the drops kept running out and she felt soon she would have nothing but wet hands and emptiness.
She watched Nathan’s face in the glow of the fire. His broad forehead, the dark slashes of his brows. The nose that would, on any other face, seem too large, too striking, yet on him fit perfectly. Lips belonging to a warrior angel, that spoke without compromise and kissed her without mercy.
Not so long ago, she had not known him. Yet it felt as if there had always been a part of her set aside only for him. Strange, that. Strange and terrible and wonderful. She had been so certain it was Michael and Michael alone who held her heart and that, with his death, he’d taken her heart with him to the cold land of loss and forgetting. Yet enough of her heart remained alive to grow and blossom in the tropical heat of Nathan’s love.
“And when there are no more Heirs of Albion?” Nathan asked.
Catullus said, with no hesitation, “That may never happen, but there are always more enemies, more who want to claim magic for themselves, no matter how many lives are lost.”
Michael. Tony Morris. Max Quinn. The roster of the dead. It would grow, unavoidably. A life could be extinguished in the span it took to douse a candle. Her own, or any number of people she cared about. Yet to hide away, protecting against pain, meant missing the beauty of this world, transitory as it was. Hardly a life, less than half. And protect herself against what, truly? Happiness, pleasure. Love.
Astrid rose to her feet, drawing the attention of Nathan and Catullus. Both men stood—the habit of polite society, even out here.
She wanted words. She could not find them, for they seemed too small to contain everything she felt. So, instead of speaking, she gave Nathan a look far more eloquent than she could say, and then slipped into the darkness just beyond the circumference of the fire.
Nathan might have said something to Catullus. Catullus might have answered. She hadn’t ears to hear. She let the forest take her, enfold her in its night sounds and cloak of shadows. The crunch and scent of pine needles under her boots. Nocturnal birds measuring their territory in hoots. Her own pulse and breath as she felt herself at the very edge of safety.
Behind her, coming closer, gaining speed and nearly silent, Nathan padded. He’d taken the wilderness into him, now.
He came beside her within seconds. Yet he did not try to take hold of her or press her with questions. They fell into step naturally, side by side, delving farther into the forest. Silence both fraught and comfortable stretched between them like bands of light. They could not go too far, however. No one forgot the threat out there, somewhere, that none of them should be apart from the others for long.
At the base of an ancient pine, she stopped. Here, thick roots pushed into the earth, spreading in wizened profusion. The width of the trunk and roots testified to the age of the tree.
“This pine,” she said, laying her hand upon its gnarled trunk, “was alive when Julius Caesar met his death in the Senate.”
Nathan set his hand beside hers, and the sight of his long fingers close to hers but not touching sent a wave of tenderness and lush desire through her.
“It stood when horses first came to this continent.” His voice was a rumble deeper than the darkness.
“And when London burned, and Bach composed his Brandenburg concertos.” She turned and leaned against the trunk, facing him. “Destruction and creation.”
His eyes gleamed in the shadows as he braced himself over her, then drew closer, so that only a few inches separated them. Their breath threaded together as she let herself absorb the heat of his lean body. Muscle and bone, the strength and hunger of this man, barely restrained. One word, one look. That’s all it would take to open the floodgates. Holding himself back took every measure of control he possessed, and yet he did, for her, instinctively knowing what she needed at that moment.
“I have to go back to England,” she said, low and urgent. “A battle is brewing there, the battle that determines everything. If we can secure the totems, I must return with Catullus to help the Blades.”
“I know.” His words were a rough caress, his eyes a starless promise.
She pressed her lips together, aware of his own mouth so close, aware of the swift beat of her heart. A dizzying combination of fear and excitement to speak further, yet she must. “There is no means of knowing how the battle will fare, if the Blades will succeed. Or even if I will survive.”
“You will,” he said, a harder edge in his voice.
She smiled gently, a little sadly. She knew well the tenuousness of life. “You can’t know that.”
“I know it.” His jaw tightened with conviction, and the heat and determination in his eyes stopped her breath.
“If I do survive,” she said, pressing on doggedly lest she lose her nerve, “I will come back. To you. If you will wait for me. Because”—she felt just as she had moments before plunging over the waterfall, just as terrified and exhilarated, the distillation of what it meant to be alive—“I love you.”
She kept her hands plastered against her sides, needing to touch him but holding herself in check, for she would let nothing but her words speak for her. Words she had not believed she would ever utter again.
She waited for his answer. He had said, not a few hours before, that he loved her, but she couldn’t be certain of anything until she heard him say so again.
He drew even closer, their bodies separated by less than an inch, his mouth hovering over hers. His breath came as quickly as her own, his chest rising and falling as if heating the very earth. “I know that you’ll survive the upcoming battle,” he said, “because I’ll be fighting right beside you, and I’ll lay down my own life to protect yours.”
“I…oh,” she said. It took her some moments to understand. “You…will come with me?”
“Your fight is my fight,” he said. Stark and direct, his words filled her with unsparing joy. “Your cause is mine. And more than that.” He brushed her lips with his. “More than that. Your heart is my heart. I love you, Astrid. My place is with you. Always with you.”
He kissed her, a deep, purposeful kiss that demanded everything and gave everything. She sank into his kiss, the sultry slick heat of his mouth, the shared hunger. Yet neither touched, except for their mouths, as though they both needed only a tap forward into free fall.
She felt compelled to pull her lips from his, long enough to gasp, “And your tribe? The Earth Spirits?”
“Their totems will be safe,” he rasped. “And that’s all. I left them to be with you, not just for this fight, but forever. Understand this,” he growled. “You and I? The Earth Spirits called us mates, and that’s what we are. Mated. Each for the other, and not a damned thing—not the Blades, the Heirs, or any magic—will separate us. Not ever.”
She had thought herself exposed entirely. But she had one last, final layer. Gently, she removed her ring, pulling off the golden band. Ah, bittersweet. For a moment, she held it in her palm, feeling its shape press against her tender flesh, the unity of its circle, before putting it into her trouser pocket.
She held Nathan’s gaze as she did this, an act as deliberate and daring as carefully stepping off a bridge. She felt a little dizzy, quite sad, and also—joyous. Done. It was done. And both she and Nathan understood precisely what it meant. For her and for him.
She did let herself touch him then, because she could no longer stop herself. Her arms came up and encircled him, feeling the breadth of his shoulders, his narrow hips, his sleek body that inflamed not only for its beauty but because it was him, the physical manifestation of him. “My lover,” she murmured, taking back his mouth. “My love.”
Groaning, he plunged back into the kiss, wrapping her in his own taut arms. Their bodies pressed against each other, and at the contact, hips cradling hips and the immediate awareness of their shared arousal, they both gasped.
For a moment, they allowed themselves the exquisite torture of being still, feeling the sensual potential of their bodies. Between her legs, his cock was a welcome, insistent presence, full and striving toward her innermost recesses. She loved the feel of it, of him, his animal lust and human desire, and, when she could no longer bear being still, arched up into him so that his thickness rubbed precisely where she wanted him most. A bestial growl sounded deep in his throat as she pushed and moved against him.
It was not enough.
Their mouths met and held in long, molten kisses. She wanted to touch him everywhere, yet could not, because she clung to him as one might cling to shelter in a storm. But he was the storm, and she wrapped her legs around him, throwing herself into the tempest. She wasn’t afraid anymore.
“Nathan,” she gasped. “Now. Please…now.”
He looked down at her, his face tight with need, eyes burning. “You know,” he rumbled. “You know what this means.”
“I do,” she said. Her gaze held his, and they saw in each other everything—loss and joy and fear and strength. And love. Love, above all. Terrifying and marvelous.
They wasted no further time. Nathan stepped back just long enough to strip and Astrid, impatient, tugged off her boots, her socks, her trousers. She unbuttoned her shirt, but before she could pull it off, he had her again, wrapped in his arms. His bare chest pressed to hers, both already damp with sweat, and they abandoned themselves to a kiss.
Astrid twined her legs around him as he lifted her up. The swollen head and shaft of his cock slid between her folds, and she nearly felt embarrassment at her wetness. She wanted him so badly.
As he wanted her. His cock surged, solid and demanding, at the intimate contact. She moaned. Their gazes caught and locked again as he lifted her up higher and then brought her down, slowly, so slowly, filling her. Every inch of him sliding into her, breath by breath, flesh within flesh. He branded himself upon her with his deliberate heat and thickness. His retreat was just as slow, just as deliberate, and she felt his absence in her body like grief.
Astrid canted her hips to take him inside her once more. Another immersion into complete ecstasy, one that made her eyes flutter. But she would not allow herself to close her eyes. She kept them open, holding Nathan’s gaze, as he moved in and out of her with purposeful strokes, teasing, testing, taking them both to a place where bodies fused and hearts merged. They would not allow themselves to hide. This is who we are, their gazes said. Together. They sealed their bond through touch and sensation, as intimate as if they had opened their hearts like books to be read and studied.
Pleasure built, a conflagration atop an inferno. She gripped him with her arms and with her inner muscles. She would hold him however she could.
“I want,” she panted. “All of you. Now.”
“This,” he growled, punctuating the word with a hard thrust of his hips.
She cried out at the sharp pleasure. “Yes.”
He braced her against the trunk of the pine and drove into her again. “This.”
Exquisitely speared by him, she did not feel the bark at her back, only the thick slide of him within her. “More. Yes.” She was frantic now, driven only by need, as she impaled herself on him. Then she lost the ability to speak, only made formless sounds of desire and demand. Nothing had ever felt this good—continents could be formed upon the mass of her ecstasy. It overwhelmed everything.
His thrusts grew faster, harder, as he abandoned himself to the pleasure she eagerly offered. His breath came in harsh rasps. The whole of his body gleamed with sweat, and he held her as he delved as deeply as he could into the welcoming heat of her, urging them both toward coalescence and release.
She bucked, crying out, with the force of her climax. White fire consumed her. She became nothing but ashes and pleasure. And then she did something that seemed entirely right.
She bit him. On the neck.
Hers. She marked him as hers.
At the touch of her teeth against his skin, Nathan jolted, then his body completely stiffened and a fierce, rough groan tore from him. It sounded like murder or resurrection. Or a mix of both. Her name was a benediction on his lips as he flowed into her, molten, like the core of a planet.
He trailed kisses of satiation over her face, her throat while she made formless sounds of contentment. And gradually, reluctantly, they loosened, her legs sliding down his, so that she stood upon the ground. Even then, they did not take their arms from each other, but leaned together against the tree, foreheads touching, and breathed in the forest at night, as though the world had only just been created.
By the light of the fire, Catullus examined his Compass. No one had made alterations to the design, not since Portia Graves’s time, and it seemed about due for some improvements, incorporating innovation and new technology. Lately, he’d been thinking about adding a means of measuring distance and possibly height. Such options could prove useful for Blades in the field.
He looked up briefly when the breeze carried the sound of a soft moan. Astrid. Out there in the darkness with Lesperance.
Catullus was forty-one years old. He knew precisely what Astrid and Lesperance were doing.
Bending back to his work, Catullus took a small screwdriver from a slim case and began to carefully remove the front plate of the Compass. He knew what he’d find within the Compass, having disassembled his own hundreds of times. Whenever he found himself in the field, away from his workshop, and needing a distrac
tion for his busy mind, he invariably dismantled his Compass to search for ways of refinement.
Yet the mechanism and magnets could not hold his attention tonight. He didn’t want to think about Astrid and Lesperance making love, but, for all the attention his brain received from the world, he was still a man, with a man’s needs.
Penelope Welham. The last woman he’d taken to bed. That was…six weeks ago? Eight? A prosperous mercer’s widow in Southampton, Penny had a long-standing arrangement with Catullus. When he was in town and found time away from his workshop, he made semiregular visits to her bed. Neither Penny nor Catullus expected fidelity from the other. In truth, they expected nothing more than a few hours of sex. Conversation was kept to a minimum. Neither inquired about the other’s life. They were convenient for each other, and that was all.
Catullus forced himself to concentrate on the Compass. Such a simple device, yet he knew it could be made better with only a few small adjustments.
He was happy for Astrid, truly. He could not resent her moving forward. And that she had found love not once, but twice, astounded him. Catullus had spoken truthfully when he told her he’d never once been in love. He felt like an alchemist, hearing tales and seeing with his own eyes the transformation of lead into gold, yet unable to make the metamorphosis himself.
When it came to sexual experience, Catullus had his fair share. But beyond the physical act of making love, he was nearly as green as a youth half his age. He found that, when out of bed, he and his lovers barely understood each other. The women were fascinated by either his skin color or his intellect, finding him to be an intriguing enigma but not truly a man. Conversations were awkward, stilted, and he never truly knew what to say. The women were largely blank. His mind drifted back to his work. At least there, he found something that stimulated more than his body.
A growl unfurled from the darkness. Somewhere between a man and an animal. But entirely carnal, utterly erotic.
Catullus gritted his teeth together at the sound. He couldn’t fault Lesperance and Astrid for making love this night. Quinn’s death hit them all hard, and it was natural to affirm life, and love, through the joining of bodies. Yet still, bloody irritating to be reminded that, while Astrid and Lesperance had discovered love with each other, Catullus was deeply, profoundly alone.
